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Configuring an Airport Base Station

I have recently re-worked the configuration guide to better reflect new features and the idiosyncrasies of the various base stations. If your bookmark went bad due to the reconfiguration of the site, please accept my apology. However, I hope that you will find the new guides to be improved substantially.

While Apple advocates the use of its Assistant to set up ABS', I prefer using the admin utility. There are a number of Admin Utilities out there. Even better, Apple has individual feature-sets by station. Thus, the windows for each base station will look different. I have tried to create several guides that hopefully will be useful. They are categorized by operating system and base station variety.

Before you continue, please be sure to be using Apple Airport Software version 2.0.4 on OS 9 (download here), or version 4.0.1 when using Mac OS X (download here) or Windows 2000-XP (download here). Otherwise, what you'll see on your screen will not match my screenshots and the instructions may be really confusing. You can get this information from the "About Airport" pull-down menu when you launch your Airport Admin Utility.

Here are the sets I have created thus far.

Similarly, I have not yet played with a "Extreme" base station or Airport "Express"that has the modem option using version 4.0.1 of the Apple Admin Software. Once again, a blank config file would be great. Just send them by e-mail, they're pretty small.


Which Airport Version are You Using?

A short version history from a user perspective:

Thus, if you have anything but the latest, download the latest Airport software from Versiontracker, MacUpdate, or by a visit to Apple's official Airport web-site.

To find out what version of Airport is installed on your computer, click once on the airport application icon, then select "get info" from the File menu. Or start up the airport software and select "About Airport" from under the Apple menu.